The Sales Black Box: Are You Tracking Demo Analytics?

“Once they see it, they’re hooked.” That’s a phrase I hear a lot. I can’t think of a single sales leader that would not agree that delivering a great demo to a prospect helps increase the chances that the deal will close. Sales teams spend thousands of hours in live demos engaging in one of the most data rich activities, but ironically, very few sales leaders engage in any demo metric tracking at all. It’s a black box for most organizations. Those that do track it know how important it is.

What Demo Analytics (Demolytics) Should You Track?

I recommend you start tracking some or all of the following:

• Persona or Role Tracking: Who is attending your demos? Are you demoing to the VP of Sales or the VP of Marketing more often? Once you know who is attending your demos, you can customize your demos more easily to different personas. Remember, the worst demo of all is the demo that is the same for everyone. Everyone is different, so everyone should have a different personalized experience to fit their role and their unique interests.
• Prospect Interest Analysis: What is driving the interest of each prospect?  How would they prioritize what is most important to them? What features or benefits of your product are not of any interest to your prospect? Can you categorize those for analysis? On what topics are your reps spending the most time in demos? Once you start aggregating prospect interest analysis, you can start to see patterns of what is driving interest the most, and least, and start adapting your pitch more effectively.
• Average Demos to Close: How many demos does it take to close a deal on average? Segmenting by deal size or company size is helpful too. For example, it may be useful to know that for larger deals you have to do 3 more demos on average. Also, you can start to try to bring this number down over time as you train your reps to demo less frequently but to more buying group stakeholders at the same time.
• Demo Drop-off Rate: How many demos does your team do that doesn’t lead to progression in the marketing or sales funnel?
• Demo Stakeholder Rate: How many times does a demo generate an invitation to other stakeholders for another demo? How many stakeholders eventually get involved?

You should also consider tracking demos by sales rep. These could include:

• # of Demos by Rep: How many demos per day, week, month does each rep (or sales engineer) do? How does that compare to other salespeople on the team?
• Demo to Close Ratio by Rep
• Demo Stakeholder Rate by Rep

Demo Tracking Leads to More Predictable Forecasting

Once you have a baseline, you can start to predict that certain deals will require more demos and more sales cycle time before they close. If large accounts require, on average, five demos to close, because of the size of the buying group, and a certain account has only had two demos, even though the rep says they are close to closing, you might consider it a higher risk because they haven’t had the average number of demos yet.

Can You Automate Some of This? Product Video Can Help

Good news is yes!  The Consensus sales acceleration platform automates personalized product video demos and it tracks demo analytics automatically. An automated demo is a bank of sales videos that our platform draws from in response to the prospect’s answers to questions.  Our interactive demo automation platform personalizes video and documents so each stakeholder automatically learns about your solution in the most relevant way.

Want to see an example of an automated product demo?

We call demo analytics Demolytics™. Our Demolytics dashboard helps you discover and engage the entire buying group by gathering analytics and tracking what’s important to them, what they watched, and who they shared it with. This drives agreement and gets to a purchase decision much faster than traditional sales methods. Clients have cut their sales cycles by 68% and jumped close rates by 44%.

Want to see a demo of Consensus?

Tactical Buying Group Analytics

Here’s a view of a tactical Demolytics dashboard to help you close a specific sale. You can see the interest level for each stakeholder in the buying group. Not only is this important data available to the internal salesperson, but also the champion inside the target account.

Aggregate Messaging Analytics

This is an example of the aggregate Demolytics dashboard where you can compare the interest in different features or benefits across hundreds or thousands of views.

Sales Rep Demo Performance Analytics

This dashboard shows overall demo performance as well as a leaderboard and drill down on individual rep stats.

Check out our own demo of Consensus!